Now that building information modeling (BIM) has been firmly established in the AEC industry for the design, construction, and operation of individual buildings, and infrastructure modeling—also referred to as “BIM for infrastructure”—is starting to gain some traction for the design, construction, and operation of infrastructure, we are also seeing some movement towards applying the intelligent modeling concept to the next broader level of human habitation, the city.

While we are still a long way off from having “city information models” (CIM) available for our cities, various technology solutions for it are emerging, from BIM stalwarts such as Autodesk and Bentley to CIM-specific solutions from companies such as virtualcitySYSTEMS, Cityzenith, SmarterBetterCities, CyberCity 3D, and Agency9, of of which are discussed in this article. It also looks at how CIM is different from the concept of “Smart Cities” that we are increasingly starting to hear more about.

URL: http://www.aecbytes.com/feature/2016/CityInformationModeling.html

Last week, AECbytes published Part 1 of its annual technology roundup highlighting recent key developments in AEC technology from the leading vendors industry including GRAPHISOFT, Bentley, Autodesk, Trimble, and Allplan.

This article, Part 2 of the roundup, continues to look at updates from other established AEC technology vendors, including Newforma Project Center, form•Z, the Sweets app from Dodge, DESTINI Estimator, and Solibri Model Checker, as well as a few more. It also provides a high-level overview of a new application about which there is a lot of buzz but very little is known so far—Flux, which came out of Google’s research incubator, Google X.

URL: http://www.aecbytes.com/newsletter/2016/issue_82.html